An appeals court in Switzerland has overturned a 2025 defamation conviction against a sleuth who had identified dozens of conference proceedings with signs of citation manipulation. The ruling orders the plaintiff to pay the sleuth’s legal expenses.
The judgment clears Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, in a lawsuit filed against him in 2023 by Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
The case stemmed from a blog post Pirelli published in January 2023 summarizing problems with the proceedings of conferences organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Aljawarneh was the chair of most of the conferences, and the proceedings included signs of citation stuffing in Aljawarneh’s favor.
Continue reading Swiss court clears sleuth in defamation case, awards him legal costs